Oliver Twist

Among other public buildings in a certain town, which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, there is one anciently common to most towns, great or small: to wit, a workhouse....

"There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts."

"What a fine thing capital punishment is! Dead men never repent; dead men never bring awkward stories to light."

But, if the spirits of the Dead ever come back to earth, to visit spots hallowed by the love—the love beyond the grave—of those whom they knew in life, I believe that the shade of Agnes sometimes hovers round that solemn nook. I believe it none the less because that nook is in a Church, and she was weak and erring.

Oliver Twist

A city of two tales

Oliver Twist is probably the novel most associated with Dickens,
though not nearly his best nor his most admired.

It is also the first novel to take a child as the central character,
which is extraordinary when you consider the great number of novels
to feature kids ever since.

It's also Dickens's first real novel, discounting The Pickwick
Papers as episodic, only slightly removed from his first book of stories,
Sketches by Boz.

In my reading, though, Oliver Twist is really two novels.

Actually you could divide Oliver Twist into any number of
sections: the hard early life of an orphan, his first adventures in
London with the gang of petty criminals, his happy period of rescue
and recovery, his subsequent recapture by the gang, and his subsequent
re-rescue. Not to mention subplots involving the nefarious characters
surrounding Oliver.

But for me there are two major stories uneasily intertwined throughout
the novel, the one overshadowing the other in reader interest until
the prominent one is snuffed out near the end and the background tale
comes to the fore.

The main story is what we've come to know so well through films and
has become a staple of popular culture, the guileless child
taken advantage of firstly by institutions of the day, then by businesses,
and finally by outright criminals. This is the orphan with the outreached
bowl asking for more porridge. The boy making his ragged way to London
by foot. The starving street urchin thrown in with the colourful Artful
Dodger in the pickpocket gang schooled by the evil but pathetic Fagin.
The innocent lad variously chased and shot as though he were a criminal.
His involvement in the tragedies of the kind-hearted Nancy and her vicious
lover Bill Sikes.

This is the story we are caught up in, following every vicissitude
and victory in Oliver's daily life.

Yet, throughout all this, we are vaguely aware of a background story
concerning Oliver's "heritage". Here is the melodrama of his mother
who dies in childbirth, some mysterious thing she tries to leave him,
the affair of Mr. Bumble and Mrs. Corney, who eventually join in the
murky intrigues of a murderous Mr. Monks, plotting—we know not why until
near the end—against the unaware Oliver.

Then, when at last the reader finds Oliver delivered from immediate
evil-doers and into the compassionate household of Mr. Brownlow and
his ward Rose, the background story takes over to raise Oliver to his
true place in the world.

Yet these last chapters feel tacked on. They seem no longer to concern
the Oliver we've come to know through the adventures of his short life.

Dickens is not content to leave us with the thrilling and moving
story of the lost and redeemed poor boy. Oliver must be raised up socially
to show that he was never intended to be a poor kid—like the pauper
in fairy tales who turns out to be royalty. Note how throughout his
miserable upbringing and his ordeals in London, Oliver always acts and
speaks as a natural little gentleman. Honest, sensitive, kind, modest,
trusting—no matter how ill-treated he is. Dickens is at pains to show
a difference in manner and character between Oliver and the crowd he
falls in with, for Dickens knows his young protagonist is not to meant
to inhabit that social level. This is the old-fashioned conservative
side of Dickens: blood will tell. So to accomplish the raising of Oliver
to his rightful position (not just to a position given him by charity),
the Monks conspiracy must be uncovered and defeated, lots of exposition
about past history leading to Oliver's birth must be crammed in, characters
never before mentioned must be brought in, and incredible coincidences
of relationships must be piled on.

It's not that the two stories are not connected well. Several characters
straddle both plots and it all makes logical sense. But I doubt many
readers—at least today—care much about Oliver's rightful heritage. It's
noteworthy that movie versions
of Oliver tend to downplay that aspect of the novel, with at least one recent
adaptation leaving Mr. Brownlow's saving of the Oliver as an entirely
philanthropic act.

Also drawing out the novel's conclusion, it seems for Dickens that
every single character—from both stories—must receive his or her just
desserts, good or bad. Though in truth this is something to be admired
about Dickens and most of his nineteenth-century colleagues in contract
to many more modern novelists: they really know how to tie up loose
ends satisfyingly.

So let's give Dickens a break. The necessity for Dickens of revealing
Oliver to be of higher caste can chalked up to the temper of his audience
at the time. The really significant observation about Oliver Twist
is that it explodes with memorable characters in the widest dramatic
range possible: tragic, comic, scary, suspenseful, pathetic, bathetic....
Dickens himself compared his mixture to the marbling of bacon.

This marbling is something new in popular novels. With Oliver
Twist, novels can become Shakespearean in their human breadth. It
must have been startling for readers of that time to be suddenly confronted
with so many credible and vividly drawn characters ensconced in such
a rich plot with such a diversity of modes woven (nearly) seamlessly
together in each weekly instalment of Oliver Twist.

Moreover, to find them in the gritty social setting of England's
lowest classes. For we mustn't forget that Oliver Twist was also
one of the most socially conscious and liberal (in the best sense of
that word) literary productions of its time. Here we see Dickens's reformist
side. With his other works, it helped create the public will in England
that led to the elimination of workhouses, reform of child-labour laws,
and improvements to public welfare—and it exposed the new Poor Law of the
day that cruelly broke up indigent families.

Now of course we read Oliver Twist less politically. For us
the characters live on, even if after nearly two centuries they
have become cultural clichés. But today's writers can
still read Oliver Twist to try to figure out how Dickens managed
to pull off this miracle of mood and characterization.